Health services include proven clinical preventive care, behavioral, dental, vision, hearing and primary care, medical and surgical treatments, chronic condition management and compassionate end of life care. The promise of this wide range of health services is improvement in both the quality and length of our lives. Key indicators of how Washington measures in the category of Increasing Value in Health Services include: Health Home Medical Care Quality

But a badly fragmented health care system and uneven quality can undermine the vaule of health services. So affordable, stable, trusted and ongoing relationships with health experts are indispensable. Good, reliable quality is also essential to value in health services.

In Washington, our hospital association is now coordinating the efforts of most Washington hospitals to improve quality by implementing several key patient safety or medical care quality procedures. Even rural hospitals, for which many of the high service-volume based quality indicators are inappropriate, are engaged in quality improvement efforts. These initiatives help to support the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Quality Initiative that rate hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies nationwide on more than 100 quality measures.

But even these measures may be inadequate to reflect the public's concern about the ability of the medical care system to produce value commensurate with the size of our financial investments in it. To this end, some have suggested developing new measures like "health output per dollar invested."

WHF believes that improving the value of health services is key to making Washington the Healthiest State in the Nation. We have selected the above two measures to track it. Both require refinement. Each captures an essential element of value improvement we believe must occur.

View the "Increasing Value in Health Services" Section of WHF's 2006 Report Card on Washington's Health.

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